Greatness Freezes Over
Inside Giant Glaciers in Iceland
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Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Iceland.
Read MoreDiamond Beach's stranded icebergs
A closer look at one of Iceland's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreIceland feels less like a country than an ongoing argument between fire and ice, one that occasionally spills into the news when a volcano interrupts European air traffic. I've driven the Ring Road in a June that never quite got dark, past waterfalls with names longer than the distance between them, past sheep grazing on land still visibly raw from the last eruption. Reykjavík itself holds two-thirds of the population and most of the country's irony, a small, cultured capital that produces disproportionate amounts of literature and music for its size. Outside the capital, the interior is close to uninhabited, a moonscape of black sand and glacier that NASA once used to train astronauts. It's a young landscape, geologically speaking, and it behaves like it, still settling into its own shape.
Chapter One
The Golden Circle is a start, not an ending
Most visitors do the Golden Circle: Þingvellir, where you can walk between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates as they pull apart a few centimeters a year; Geysir, the geothermal field that gave every geyser on earth its name; and Gullfoss, a waterfall that drops in two brutal stages into a canyon it carved itself. It's a fine introduction, and I don't discourage it. But the real reward is continuing east along the south coast to Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon where icebergs calve off Breiðamerkurjökull and drift out to a black sand beach studded with ice chunks the size of cars, a beach locals call Diamond Beach for good reason.
“Iceland is a country still being written by its own volcanoes, and you can watch the draft change in real time.”
Chapter Two
Hot springs beyond the Blue Lagoon
The Blue Lagoon is genuinely lovely and also genuinely crowded, a milky geothermal pool with its own gift shop economy. I prefer the Westfjords or the highland routes, where hot springs sit unmarked in fields, sometimes just a wooden platform and a trust system for anyone who wants to soak. Seljavallalaug, an old concrete pool built into a valley near a volcano, requires a twenty-minute walk to reach and rewards it with total quiet and mountains on every side. Icelanders treat hot springs the way other cultures treat cafés, a place to sit still for an hour, and the etiquette of showering thoroughly beforehand is taken more seriously than almost any other local custom.
The Short List
Do not miss in Iceland
At a glance
Iceland in numbers
- Capital
- Reykjavík
- Language
- Icelandic
- Currency
- Icelandic króna (ISK)
- Best time
- June to August for daylight, February to March for the northern lights
Did you know
Iceland has no standing army and runs almost entirely on renewable geothermal and hydroelectric power.